RE: Ballast
happy life skills foundation (hapilife@efn.org)
Wed, 16 Jun 1999 00:39:18 -0700 (PDT)
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West Wight Potter Website at URL
http://www.lesbois.com/wwpotter/
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I called around today looking for various types of ballast material. lead
costs a lot. iron will rust. WATER IS CHEAP! i scavenged 6 empty gallon
milk jugs and filled them with lake water at dockside and threw them up in
the bow and lashed them to the anchor ring in the anchor compartment in my
15 with some nylon string to keep them in the bow and IT WORKED GREAT!!!!
at 8.8 lbs per gallon i added 50 pounds of ballast up front down low.FREE.
when we decided to nap for a while we just moved them to the cockpit no
big deal. afterwards we left them in the boat but you could just empty the
water out. Sure, keep the boat light for trailering, use water it doesn't
scratch up the boat like bricks would. the only downside would be if you
punctured the jugs somehow then the bilge would get some water in it.
Ken Silverman, p15 "Vegan Lorax"
PS- had the most outrageous sail this evening. started out dead
calm.rigged the boat and motored out to the floating bathroom anchored in
the middle of the lake and tested out "Leakin' Lena". nice spot for a
head. caught a whisper of a breeze and barely moved for 25 minutes the the
WIND came up, with a rainstorm, just light rain but MAN was it BLowing!!!
and Lorax did fine, wow, so much weather helm. 4 foot swells! white caps!
she did just fine, taking the seas hardly any splash. broad reach all the
way down to the island, less wind. visited the ospreys on their raised
nests on these funny kinda poles sticking out of the water. got stuck in
the mud near the nest the birds were pissed! lowered sails, raised cb, put
in the oars off we went! down cb, up sails, stow oars, off we went home,
lighter winds, beautiful red/purple sunset as we turned into the port the
littlest bit of a rainbow appeared over us in the fading sunset......the
best life can give!